Watching People Watch Flying Lotus' Directorial Film Debut 'Kuso'
Since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Kuso has made a name for itself as one of the most absurd, disgusting, and polarizing feature films to ever exist.
Directed and written by Steven Ellison (better known to many as Flying Lotus), the hour-and-a-half film offers a glimpse into the lives of various California residents who have survived a catastrophic earthquake. However, surviving comes with a price — somehow the earthquake has left them all with a variety of deformities. Through the movie's four vignettes loosely tied together in the form of channel surfing, viewers are submitted to a narrative that can be poignant and provocative one moment, and absolutely bizarre the next.
A part of the allure of Kuso is the sociological experiment it encourages — seeing how other people react to the film. Throughout the week Ellison premiered his directorial film debut in New York City with two showings — one at the House Of Vans and the other at Nitehawk Cinema. The venues are drastically different from one another — the former, hosts various events (concerts, movie showings) and resides inside a skate park, while the latter functions solely as a movie theater. So, experiencing Kuso twice in a row in different spaces with different people was revelatory, as our thresholds for the absurd were challenged in real time.
When considering the headlines of people walking out en masse during Kuso's Sundance premiere, it's inevitable to assume the outcome would be similar at the film's showing in New York City. But no one walked out at either, with audiences at both predominantly young, between the ages of 18 and 30. But, that doesn't mean that people weren't uncomfortable.
The film is an endurance test of grotesque images and sounds, and if the opening sequence of a woman choking her partner (who happens to also be her brother) with a strap only for him to climax and spread his semen over her face and proceed to kiss her, didn't leave someone distraught, surely one of the movie's many other scenes filled with puss, semen, shit, spit, vomit, and other bodily fluids did. There were multiple times I'd look at other watchers, only to see their mouths agape at the sight of a cockroach-looking creature crawling out of George Clinton's asshole, or their head down at the sight of a woman scraping her teeth against concrete, or their eyes covered as a girl and her other-dimensional friends watch a penis get stabbed on TV.
The normalcy of the absurd in Kuso is arguably what makes the movie so compelling. Contextualized with most dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies, it's fascinating to see the genre through a somewhat comical lens. No one is leading a crusade against a tyrannical leader or trying to find a cure. Everyone has embraced the insanity that has come as a result of Los Angeles being destroyed, with no one batting an eye at the nihilism they've accepted and succumbed to.
One could interpret this as a commentary on the desensitization of the images we consume each and every day, especially in the age of the Internet. Nowadays, it's practically impossible not to skim through one's Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter without seeing a video displaying some form of violence being enacted on something or someone. I found a strange delight in seeing people distraught by some of the images presented in Kuso, because it indicated they were feeling something. That unlike some of the people inhabiting the world of Kuso, they're not desensitized to the madness.
One such moment that really stood out was toward the film's ending, in which the aforementioned girl confides in her other-dimensional friends that she is going to get an abortion. One of the friends forcibly removes the fetus out of the girl (backed by a sound bite of Mortal Kombat's Scorpion screaming "Get over here!") and after looking at it for a few seconds, chooses to smoke it. Where in the first screening I heard a crowd of girls applaud the scene, at the second showing I watched a girl curl up and turn her face away from the screen during this moment, her boyfriend comforting her while watching on.
This is arguably the film's most divisive scene, providing a very extreme commentary on an ongoing battle throughout the world, but specifically in the United States with women's reproductive health rights. This was the only scene that briefly pulled all of us out of the world of Kuso and reminded us that we're already living in a nightmare, sans the copious amount of puss, semen, shit, spit, vomit, and other bodily fluids.
But something that everyone seemed to agree with (aside from how polarizing the film is) at both shows was the music. This was our first introduction to Ellison the director, but prior to watching Kuso we only knew of Ellison the producer. To see both of these worlds intersect was a treat, with the music being displayed in a manner similar to that of Adult Swim: brief and relieving before sending viewers into the next surreal sequence.
Watching people watch Kuso is just as enjoyable as watching the film itself. From seeing how repulsed people were at watching a man have sex with a sentient boil (and finishing) to seeing a number of young black people at the first showing so immersed in the film, happy to see a black director tackling a world of weirdness often not afforded to black artists, Kuso was a sight to see for so many reasons. But don't say I didn't warn you — Kuso is not for everybody.
Kuso drops July 21 on Shudder.